ZGram - 8/9/2004 - "IRVING: '"Rather than let me in, Canberra changed the law'"

[zgrams at zgrams.zundelsite.org]

ZGRAM - WHERE TRUTH IS DESTINY:  NOW MORE THAN EVER!

August 9, 2004

Good Morning from the Zundelsite:

Here is a glimpse at the life of the most prominent "Revisionist" 
writer, David Irving.  I put "Revisionist" in quotations because 
David doesn't like to be called a "Revisionist", as he has stressed 
on many an occasion.  Nonetheless, the fate of all Revisionist 
writers has been his ever since he strode into the 1988 Zundel Trial 
and put himself on the side of the Leuchter Report. 

Below is his most recent experience.




David Irving comments:

NOW here's a strange occurrence. On Tuesday morning, August 3, I 
received an email from Michael Vance, an editor of The Press, the 
leading newspaper of Christchurch, New Zealand, asking me to write an 
article in these terms: "We are seeking a piece from you outlining 
why you should be allowed to visit New Zealand - 1500 words would be 
ideal and we would pay [...] ... The Press is published in 
Christchurch and circulates to all the South Island. Yours sincerely, 
Michael Vance, Associate editor"

    The fee offered was not fat, but what the hell. I said yes and 
submitted within four or five hours the article [below].


[Key West, Friday, August 6, 2004]
------------------------------------------------------------------------

[START]

"Rather than let me in, Canberra changed the law"

By David Irving

THIS is not a controversy of my own making. I gave notice of my 
coming to New Zealand on my website last year. I have friends in New 
Zealand, and scores of Australians have also expressed to me an 
interest in flying over the Tasman to meet me again. As of this 
morning, ninety-one have pre-registered and asked for more details.

In April or May I wrote to the New Zealand archives about permission 
to use the papers of Peter Fraser, the wartime premier. I purchased 
back in May the Qantas tickets that will take me from Los Angeles to 
Auckland next month. I had made no actual speaking plans, and fixed 
no locations, until I received an invitation from the National Press 
Club in Wellington to speak. I had no idea there would be this 
knee-jerk reaction, this sudden flare-up in parts of the New Zealand 
community.


  BUT then, I was once wrong about Australia too. I had visited that 
country twice, seen my Churchill biography's first volume sweep to 
the top of the Sydney Morning Herald best-sellers -- and then I was 
banned. I fought four legal actions, won two and lost two.

The Full Federal Court court admonished Canberra that the ban on me 
was illegal. Rather than let me in, Canberra changed the immigration 
law.

It gets worse. One of my five daughters has married an Australian; 
she lives in Brisbane, is an Australian citizen and civil servant: I 
have an automatic "next of kin" right to enter, right?

Wrong -- John Howard has announced that they will change that law 
too, if necessary. He knows which side his party's bread is buttered.

------------------------------------------------------------------------

So how is it with New Zealand? I have visited New Zealand peacefully 
before, caused no riots, broken no laws. "Nobody died," as they now 
say in England, comparing others with Tony Blair and his more 
egregious misdemeanours. I have a clean criminal record; have had a 
clean driving licence for fifty years; and I don't smoke, I've never 
done drugs, and I don't commit any of the other solecisms upon which 
modern society frowns.

But NZ, it turns out, is a tough country to get into (unless, it 
seems, you use the stolen identity of a quadruple paraplegic and wear 
dark glasses). I have read in the newspapers -- in other words it is 
still rather wooly and unofficial -- that some mid-level immigration 
official has defined that I "can" be barred from the country because 
I have "been deported."

That is true: twelve years ago, in 1992, under very dark and 
mysterious circumstances, I found myself being paraded before the 
media across three thousand miles of Canada from Vancouver to 
Ontario, tried there by an immigration court for three weeks on a 
pretext, and bundled out of the country on the floor of an Air Canada 
plane.

I managed to hold a pen in my manacled hands, as a small statement of 
protest. After all, I am a writer, and how many writers are subjected 
to this kind of thing?

I would like some journalist one day to ask that mid-level NZ 
Immigration official -- the one who says I "can" be barred: "How many 
people has your service actually barred recently on the grounds that 
they have 'been deported' elsewhere?" Or is it just me?

Suppose some friendly country's fine journalist is deported from Iran 
for writing about their uranium-enrichment plants: Barred from New 
Zealand now? BBC journalists are constantly being deported, for 
instance from a certain Middle East country, because of BBC reporting 
about Palestine: if they want to holiday in New Zealand, are they 
going to find themselves tossed onto the floor at the Heathrow 
check-in counter, trussed and handcuffed and dumped on the sidewalk 
outside?

Of course not. Thinking people may even regard what such journalists 
write as being that much more reliable, as they are willing to go the 
extra mile, even if it offends national or other vested interests, 
when they want to find out and publish the truth.

Which brings us to the crunch point: I fancy I hear that mid-level 
immigration official say, that's a different story: the BBC guy was 
writing views of which we approve; this David Irving guy doesn't, 
he's a denier.

Well, actually he isn't that either. I deny it.

It all began in 1990 when I said in a public meeting in Munich, 
Germany (alright, it was in a huge beerhall), that the "gas chamber 
they show to the tourists in Auschwitz concentration camp is a fake, 
built after the war."

Under Germany's current laws, I was fined DM.30,000 (around $25,000) 
for that one remark, and in 1993 permanently excluded from Germany: 
which caused my enemies much glee, as most of my sources, archives, 
and publishers are there.

That ban is illegal under United Nations human rights treaties, under 
the Helsinki Accords, and under European law, but what the hell: I 
can live without the Germans. I have of course abided by the ban -- 
even though the Polish Government admitted in 1995 that the building 
in question, the one shown to the tourists, was erected by the Polish 
communist authorities in 1948, three years after the war ended.

But it was used to justify the proceedings in Canada. So effectively 
you are allowing Germany to decide who can visit New Zealand and 
speak to audiences there -- a privilege most of us would consider 
Germany to have forfeited consequent on the events of 1939-1945.

In her 1996 book Denying the Holocaust, American scholar Deborah 
Lipstadt called me the most dangerous of "their" opponents. She 
called me a "Holocaust denier." It is a poisonous label, like 
"paedophile," and I fought back.

From January to April 2000 I fought a historic three-month libel 
action in London, at great personal expense, to shake off that easy 
smear. The defendants, funded (as they admitted) by Stephen Spielberg 
and all the usual media oligarchs, poured around ten million NZ 
dollars into the London High Court to defend themselves. Ten million. 
If it was that obvious, they could have done the job in a day at a 
fraction of the cost.

In the end I lost. Loser pays all, that's the rule in the UK. My 
Mayfair home of 38 years was seized and sold, along with my library 
and research archives and everything that I and my family owned. But 
I don't regret having fought back.

I would do it again. I had to act as a litigant in person, as I could 
not afford the million-dollar fees that the great libel counsel 
charge. One of them, the late great George Carman QC, told his son 
that he thought on the evidence that I should have won.

For three months I was outnumbered in that court room, forty to one: 
forty barristers, lawyers, solicitors, historians, graduate students, 
assistants, and the rest, on one side of the courtroom, and myself on 
the other.

The other side have already produced six books on the Lipstadt Trial 
(including four written by their expert witnesses who swore on oath, 
when I cross examined them as to their neutrality, that they were not 
planning to write such books) and two films, and I hear that HBO are 
making a film too, with Anthony Hopkins, "Hannibal Lecter," playing 
myself.


I HAVE never written either a book or article about what they call 
the Holocaust. Anybody who has read my books knows what I have 
written on the Jewish tragedy of WW2, and what my position is: Much 
of the popular version of events is true, horribly so; about some of 
it we are entitled to be sceptical; and some of it is just plain made 
up.

A historian can't, or at least he shouldn't, ignore that, if he's 
going to do his job right: and few experts in my field have denied my 
qualities as an historian. Even Sir Charles Gray, the judge in the 
libel action, whose words against me are quoted with such profligacy 
by my opponents, also stated emphatically in his 333-page judgment 
that my knowledge of World War II is "unparalleled".

In my Hitler and Goebbels biographies I gave full details of the 
anti-Jewish atrocities committed by the Nazis, in fact fuller than 
most accounts (and, by the way, just try to buy my books in any NZ 
high-street bookstore, and then read again where David Zwartz says, 
as he does in a letter to an American professor this morning, that my 
books, tapes, and videos "are available to anyone who wishes to 
access them, so there is no question of suppressing his [my] ideas.")

That is why the "denier" taunt is so offensive to me. It is a 
poisonous label, and Zwartz and his ilk fling it around at will to 
silence their more dangerous critics, and the skeptics, who are then 
robbed of any means of defence by the bans, deportations, and other 
devices which the puzzled New Zealanders are now seeing being 
deployed in their own country.

New Zealanders should say, If Mr Irving is free to visit the whole of 
Africa, South America, Asia, the United States (where I now commute, 
research, and live six months of every year) and Russia, why is he 
being kept from us and we from him?

Even Nelson Mandela's South Africa has lifted the ban imposed on my 
speaking there, stating that it had been imposed by "the discredited 
outgoing apartheid regime."

If a small community despises me, they do not have to come and hear 
me. They can build a wall and retreat behind it until I am gone. I am 
not interested in them. In fact I am not going to be saying anything 
about them or their history at all.

© David Irving 2004

[END]

    Thud. Ooof. Silence. Not announced, not acknowledged, and not 
published. I wonder how often that happens to one of the Traditional 
Enemy who submits an Op-Ed piece to, say, The Los Angeles Times, even 
an uncommissioned one (but this one was commissioned).

    In a breach of editorial etiquette, Vance not only failed to 
publish, he has ignored several requests from me since then even to 
acknowledge the article. I am beginning to worry for him. He seems to 
have fallen off the end of the Earth.

    I do hope that nothing has happened to this brave associate editor 
of the South Island's leading newspaper?

Write to Michael Vance: are you OK?

-------------------------------

  Aug 3, 2004 Jerusalem Post: Israel Government applauds Irving ban I 
suspect that had it not been for the trial of the two alleged Mossad 
agents in the passport fraud case, and the precipitous flight to 
Israel of the Kiwi accused of being their accomplice, none of this 
would have occurred. Like the gravestones outrage, making a fuss 
about my visit provides a useful distraction for New Zealanders from 
the grim business of what the Mossad may have been up to in their 
back yard.

The small NZ Jewish community is not a body that I had intended 
visiting, speaking to, or indeed even speaking about.

I had been assured by the London travel agents I have dealt with for 
nearly fifty years that "any British Passport holder with the right 
of abode in the UK is entitled to travel into New Zealand visa free 
for a stay of 6 months." Two weeks ago they confirmed this. Which was 
as I thought.